Ryan McCurry – President

Ryan McCurry – President

I started working with ACHWorks in late 1999 as I finished my Managing Information Systems degree at California State University Sacramento. Like most small companies, our team members had to wear multiple hats, I was a customer service person, network administrator, and web designer, to start with. I was fortunate that the company was willing to work around my school schedule. I remember in those early days, customer service calls would be routed to me between classes. Taking support calls while walking between buildings; I would often be interrupted with the question “do I hear chickens?” You see, some years before, a rival school had deposited a number of “free range” chickens on our campus, it seemed they were always clucking nearby when I was on a support call; especially the roosters.

Those early days were truly exciting. We constantly solicited customer feedback and would work those suggestions into the system as new features. Most of our success can be attributed to our customer’s requests, and our developer’s ability to incorporate them into the system, that remains true today. Back then, we were only bringing in about $10,000.00 a month, now of course we have processed over seventy billion dollars of payments. We took the system from a single user deployed database software, to a multi-user online virtual terminal, with a fully featured API. We went from a small desktop server and modem bank to a fully featured PCI and SSAE16 SOC compliant data center.

I look back at how I got here and feel incredibly fortunate to have met Loyd Forrest, our founder. We grew this company organically according to Loyd’s vison. It’s not just the finances, or the system that grew organically, Loyd allowed us as business partners to grow.

It’s funny, I don’t think I have ever met anyone whose goal was to get into payments, even Loyd only stumbled into it. Most of us just ended up here. When people ask me what I do, I explain that we are a software company that processes payments, like gym memberships, insurance premiums, payroll etc. but that’s really not what we do, we sell solutions for payments. When we speak with a new prospect or an existing customer, we want to understand their business, and see how what we do, can help them. Sometimes, our solution saves them time, sometimes it saves them money, often both, but sometimes we don’t save them time or money, what we do is provide them system expertise and management, so that they don’t have to worry about their money or their payments, they can concentrate on their business, knowing that we are concentrating on their payments.